So I’ve been working on building my first game as a way to test everything out now that PointClickPress.com is up and running. I wanted to create something like all the adventure games I played growing up. My game is called “The Great Underground Adventure” and is a Zork-esque story which takes place underneath an abandoned white house. The similarities end there though as my story features a talking cat in need of some help. You must journey to the world below in order to gather ingredients that will lift the curse that has been cast on the poor feline.

I’m a developer, not an artist, but I needed artwork for the game. I decided to go with photos thinking that it would be easier than drawing all the locations myself. I hunted around, snapped some photos, and have begun placing the photos in scenes and connecting the locations together. Choosing this path for the artwork has unforeseen concequences.

Where original artwork could have allowed for simplification of each scene, I now have hundreds and hundreds of photos in order to allow the player to navigate each location in a way that makes sense. The house I took photos of had five upstairs rooms; My plot only called for two, but a player would expect to be able to navigate through all displayed doorways, so I made sure each room was available and began expanding the story to fit the locations. There also accidental things in each photo. Sorry you can’t pick up the bucket that just happened to be in the foreground when the photo was taken. I’ve also had to re-shoot every location in the game as each time no matter how many photos I took I would miss a few images that would be needed to stitch the scenes together.

On one hand, I think the photos look amazing. On the other hand this is way more complicated than original artwork would be. I hope to finish “The Great Underground Adventure” by the end of July so I can show it off to everyone, but first I gotta go take some more pictures…

Thanks to all of you for giving PointClickPress a try. I’ve been working on PCP for over a year now and am excited to finally share it. If you need help please consider posting in the forums because others may have the same questions as you. Also, feel free to update the wiki if you find the help information lacking. Finally you are always welcome to email me at dan [at] danielgaspar.com.